9. The Effects of the Economic Crisis on Dispersed Urban Planning in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region

Abstract

This paper is about the main features of the process of urban dispersion that the Barcelona metropolitan network has gone through in the last decades and its present configuration. Also, it aims at identifying the sociodemographic effects of the present economic crisis in this kind of urban spaces. The features of “residential dispersed urbanism”—the extra costs of living in such areas, the high levels indebtedness of families that have recently moved, and the limited family solidarity and scarcely rooted communitarian networks—make this kind of urban development bound to reflect the social effects of the present economic crisis, also dubbed the Great Twenty-First Century Recession.

Here, we present the first results of our comparative analysis of the periods 2002-2007 and 2008-2014 based on secondary data on real estate markets, population growth and structure, and residential mobility, as well as unemployment rates and available household income. Even though the strongest effects or the economic crisis are not still visible (as dispersed municipalities are mostly populated by the middle and high classes, which are able to readjust their adaptive responses in situations of crisis), the study has indeed detected the ways in which households have adapted to the new conditions and it has pointed out some of the future social risks involved.